1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system, and in particular to a method and apparatus for offloading Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to hardware.
2. Description of Related Art
When two computers communicate using TCP, incoming TCP packets are identified by a quintuple of the packet's protocol number, source IP address, source port number, destination IP address and destination port number. Using all five fields to associate an incoming packet with a given process complicates hardware TCP implementations. In an effort to improve host processor utilization, TCP/IP functions are being off-loaded to hardware. In a worst case scenario, all five fields from the incoming packet are compared and routed accordingly. To handle the worst case scenario, a relatively large amount of data is used.
Therefore, a more efficient mechanism is needed for determining which process, for example, a thread, a socket or a queue, is associated with an incoming packet. The mechanism described in the present invention describes a TCP option which facilitates offload of normal TCP receive packet processing. The mechanism described in this invention defines how an incoming packet will identify the specific process (queue) that shall receive the incoming packet.